99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-75- Secret Staircases

Episode Date: March 21, 2013

Wherever there is sufficient demand to move between two points of differing elevation, there are stairs. In some hilly neighborhoods of California–if you know where to look–you’ll find public, outdoor staircases. The large number of hidden public staircases is part … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Okay, this is Secret Stairs East Bay walk number 30. If there is ever a place that's higher up than where you're standing, there's a reasonable chance you're gonna want to go up. And wherever there is sufficient demand to move between two points of different elevation, there are stairs. Turn left, walking between the imposing gates onto Rock Ridge Boulevard. Yep. Note the line of very tall, very old palm trees ahead of you.

Check. California has a lot of hills. And in certain neighborhoods in our great state, you can find outdoor stairs. Then just past the house at 6095, find the almost hidden staircase. It is your first climb. Public stairs. Let's see. 6095, 609, 6107, 6101. If you know how to look for them. Holy moly, I totally miss this. Wow, I walked right by these steps and there they are. That's our producer Sam Greenspan and as you may remember, he just moved

to the Bay Area. I think I knew California had hills, I just didn't realize how much of a thing it is here. The large number of often hidden public staircases is one of the major reasons why the Bay Area is so great. The tourist crippling Philbert steps to Cointour are not to be missed, the monument-waste staircase that leads you to my favorite place in the city the pedestal of what used to be sutros triumph of light and liberty statue oh and I go out of my way every single day to walk the two blocks worth of stairs by my new place in the Berkeley Hills We have public staircases and they rock and the guy who wrote the book on East Bay Public Stairs is Charles Fleming.

But he's not from here. The East Bay stair book is actually a spin-off of his previous book, Secret Stairs of Los Angeles, which is where Charles lives. And that's where Sam tracked him down. My name is Charles Fleming. I'm the author of Secret Stairs, a walking guide to the historic staircases of Los Angeles. There's more than 30 people assembled here because one Sunday a month for the past few

years, Charles has been leading public tours through the routes in his Secret Stairs Book. And we're here where Sunset Boulevard meets the Pacific Coast Highway in Pacific Palisades about to embark on a stair walk. It's actually stair walk number 41 from the book secret stairs and we will set forth here, walk up the coast highway a little bit and then enter the historic Castile Maure area of the Pacific Palisades, which features a number of striking public staircases. And we're off. Back before the tour is before the book, before we really cared about public staircases at all, Charles just needed to walk.

Yeah, I got started with the stairs because I was trying to walk my way out of a surgery. I had had two hip replacements and two spinal surgeries in the space of about six years. And I was up for a third spinal surgery and I simply couldn't trace it. I knew what the surgery was going to be like and I knew what the rehab was going to be like. So I told the surgeon I'm not coming because I had found a little bit of walking relieved the pain that I was in. So I started walking flat streets, maybe two blocks at a time. It was that hard to walk. Oh, it was, literally, I would have to have my wife put me

in the car and drive me to a flat street and help me out of the car and watch me walk two blocks, pick me up and take me home. That was the first day. And you know, within a week, I was walking three blocks and within a month, I was walking a half a mile. And because it was working, I kept going. And when I got boardwalking the flats, I started walking the hills. When I got boardwalking the hills, I started checking out the staircases. So first point of historic interest here.

Charles knew a little about the staircases. He had seen them around silver lake where he lives. The staircases are generally either from the 1920s boom years or from the days of the Works Progress Administration. They were built because developers in hilly areas needed to find a way for prospective home buyers to get down from their houses to school or a church or a street car line. But the depression and then World War II halted staircase construction. And after that the car really became the dominant feature of the Los Angeles landscape. So staircases weren't necessary because they weren't trying to serve a pedestrian population anymore. They were trying to serve a car population. So they stopped building

the staircases. Charles looked for an inventory of all the public staircases in the city, but he couldn't find one. So I decided I would map. I figured they were probably 15 of them and I would make that my little quest. Turned out that his neighborhood, Silver Lake, had about 50 public staircases. And uh, but I felt so much healthier when I was done with that, that I decided I would do Echo Park too. I figured there were probably 10 and 12 of them over there. We'll turn out there were about 60 in Echo Park.

But I felt so healthy when I finished that that I just decided to continue. So Charles kept extending his reach to different parts of Los Angeles. Pacific palisades where we are now. And he kept walking Santa Monica, Hollywood, Los Felix, and walking Franklin Hills, and now Washington Highland Park, Eagle Rock, Garbons,

and the Valley, and Pasadena. By the end of it, he had recorded routes that use 400 public staircases. 400 in change. Well, over 500 that I actually mapped, but in terms of ones that I was able to turn into practical walks, 400 and something.

Mapping the stairs and making all the routes to connect them took Charles more than three years. At first, he just wandered aimlessly through the neighborhoods, but over time, his approach began to get a little more sophisticated. Often it was just looking for hilly areas where street cars used to run. And then I gradually figured out that if you found

a curvy street, a lamp post, and a sewer line, and a fire hydrant, in the middle of a curve, there was probably gonna be a public staircase. Because if a city is going to retain ownership of a little slice of land, it's probably going to want to pack it with as many public utilities as possible. These little slices of land often snake between houses and yards, and that's one of the great things about them.

It's exploring, getting really close to someone's yard and house without actually trespassing. But not everyone loves that these stairs are public. Once that a stairs we came across was fenced off. I'm not sure who put the gate up there. It's another public staircase that was open to the public until quite recently. Charles says that at night, sometimes the staircases can get used by people looking for a hidden place to do shady business. I suppose it's possible that could happen up here in the Pacific Palisades,

but what seems more likely, at least in this case, is that someone fenced off the stairway to keep out the riffraff. The staircases all go through residential districts, and because they go quite narrowly between homes, there are a number of staircases around the city that have been closed by the residents against other residents without any permission from the city. Can they do that? Well, they can't do it legally. Charles has managed to get some of these fences taken down by leaning on congressmen and city officials, though some use less bureaucratic methods.

I know one fellow who just goes around with a bolt cutter and liberates the stairs. We couldn't confirm this, but I just love the thought of a guy going around in the dead of night with a pair of bolt cutters, liberating staircases. This is my kind of vigilante. The idea of public access to the small spaces in between private property is in and of itself compelling as is the lure of hidden passageways connecting neighborhoods across the city. But part of the magic of public stairways is that you just don't see public construction devoted solely to pedestrians all that much anymore. They feel like going back in time when your

feet connected you to everything around you. LA is kind of a hard city to own. I don't think people feel an intimate personal connection to it the way that they might if they grew up in Boston or London. And I think part of that is that you're in a car going past it so fast that most of the city is just the name of an off ramp. It's not you don't have any sense of who lives there or why they live there or what it would be like. And when you slow down and move at pedestrian pace it gives you the opportunity to get

a little more connected to it. I think anybody would want that. I think as human beings that's part of why we live in cities, why we live in communities. If the streets are arteries, then the public walkways are the occasional capillaries. They can get so narrow that only one red blood cell can fit at a time. And when you encounter someone on the path you're forced to interact to step to the side, maybe smile or not. Also, it really feels like your trespassing. I can't stress enough how fun that is. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Sam Green, Span, and me Roman Mars thanks to a Lana Gold state for taking pictures for us.

We are a project of 91.7 local public radio, KALW and San Francisco, and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars, boevelings to Secret Star walks, and you can always tell us about your favorite hidden stairs, or the flatlander equivalent of hidden stairs, at 99%invisible.org. and stairs at 99%invisible.org. Radio Tepio from PRX.